Anthony Vaccarello / Fall 2014 RTW

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Exiting the Anthony Vaccarello show, a friend turned to me and said, “Now that’s the kind of girl I want to hang out with.” And when it comes to Vaccarello, the designer luckily already does. Backstage, moments before his show, he was explaining what influenced his knockout fall collection. “I was looking at the work of [eighties fashion illustrator] Tony Viramontes, and that’s where the red and black comes from,” he said. “I was also thinking that I wanted to do an animal print, but not in the usual way, do it so it was more mechanique, industrial. And then I really wanted a silhouette that was more tomboy, lots of big jackets over something really short and tight. You know, it’s very Caroline de Maigret, the look, like when she throws a man’s biker jacket on.”

In one of those fashion-imitating-life moments, sitting front row was the ever-cool de Maigret, a close friend, muse, and supporter of Vaccarello’s, attired in something from his runway-bound fall collection, a brown shearling Perfecto over a sheer black shirt and tapered black pants, while the opening look of his show was . . . a black shearling Perfecto, gray shirt, and gray pants, worn with a whip-thin belt and vertiginous pointed pumps. In rapid succession, he built on that masculin/feminin theme. There were a ton of brilliant outerwear pieces—a hip-length aviator jacket, an elongated caban, a minimal black leather bomber—worn over turtleneck sweaters or sweaterdresses (note the cool styling detail of the silver leopard-spot pendant worn around the neckline) and minuscule leather skirts, some worked with silver buttons, substantial zippers, or asymmetric slanted hems.

That red-and-black theme appeared in yet more cuir pieces, or as gleaming beading on ribbed knits, while the specially commissioned metal leopard spots were dotted down the side of a jacket or the front of a supershort dress. For evening, the message was tiny and tight, with chain-mail metal ruffles gleaming against black leather, though the standout had to be a slinky, streamlined black satin dress, buttons snaking down the side. It was grown-up, but also instantly recognizable as Anthony Vaccarello. That, and the ever greater range he is showing, made for a kick-powered start to Paris.